Services enterprises create knowledge during any undertaken engagement. Success can often be governed by the quality of knowledge created during the engagement. Also, success and failure are directly tied to the relevant experience of the participating knowledge workers.
Information (or knowledge) is captured in the different documents that are produced in an engagement (contracts, requirement specifications, design artifacts, code, etc.). Enterprises archive these documents as assets so that the assets can be leveraged in future projects. Encapsulation and reuse of such knowledge can translate individual knowledge into an organizational capability. However, effective reuse of information can depend on the structure of the information in the repositories as well as information search and retrieval ease and accuracy.
During requirements gathering, most information is authored as unstructured documents such as word documents, spreadsheets, etc. Consulting practices often use document templates with a rudimentary structure; however, these are still treated as unstructured text in the asset repository.
Existing approaches also include domain-specific workbenches that aim to help to standardize content authoring, retain semantics, traceability between different artifacts, and store material as semi-structured data in repositories with meta-data. Also, existing approaches include free-text search using keywords for unstructured documents. However, such search results can be highly imprecise and can return a large amount of irrelevant information.
Additionally, existing enterprise search techniques are not nearly as effective as web searching techniques. For example, link analysis techniques that are instrumental in retrieving high quality web pages do not apply in the case of enterprise searching because of an absence of hyperlinked structure.
Accordingly, there exists a need for effective search techniques over enterprise repositories.